"Managers rely on focus groups--a dozen people riffing on something they know little about--to set strategies. And yet companies won't experiment to find evidence of the right way forward." Duke University-based behavioral economist Dan Ariely tells a story about what he calls a "typical case" of experiment phobia. A consumer products company asked him to design an experiment that would help it choose the best pricing model and subsequently agreed to his proposal to create multiple websites with varied offers to discover what customers responded to best. But then, predictably, the company got cold feet. "I've often tried ...